Catherine Howard

by Lacey Baldwin Smith

  Fortunately for the Howards, this was one occasion in which a quixotic sense of honour, or more probably an acute sense of caution, coincided with self-interest; shortly afterwards Henry VII returned to London, following a smashing victory in which the Earl of Lincoln was left, like his equally unfortunate uncle, dead upon the field of battle. Henry was stronger than ever, and Thomas Howard was far safer within the confines of the Tower than abroad, the subject of Tudor wrath. As legend has it, Henry was so impressed by the ‘true and faithful service’ that Thomas had rendered his previous sovereign, and by his actions while a prisoner in the Tower, that he released the Earl after three and a half years of captivity and restored to him his title and estates.’7 The King, however, with characteristic restraint, returned only the lands of Surrey’s spouse. The Howards had to prove their devotion to the new dynasty many times over before such suspicious monarchs were ready to reward them with a complete restoration of their lands and titles. The dignity of Earl Marshal had to wait another eleven years, while the final and highest estate, the dukedom of Norfolk, was not restored until Thomas Howard and his sons had indicated their loyalty beyond a shadow of a doubt, and had successfully written off the sins of the family by their victory over the Scots at the Battle of Flodden Field in 1513. Then and only then did the family regain the position it had held a generation before in 1483.

  Long before the Howards won back their ancient titles, the family had been systematically fortifying its political and social position through marital alliances with the most vigorous and distinguished families of the century. Marriages may be formed in heaven while politics remains the concern of this world, but under the Tudors, the two were intimately related. During the medieval past, the control of government rested largely with the independent baronial clans and over-powerful magnates, who at times successfully transformed the monarchy into a political football. Later, in the seventeenth century, factions within the House of Commons would determine national policy, but under the Tudors there developed within the framework of royal absolutism a variety of family politics in which matrimonial and political aIliances marched hand in hand. The system retained noticeable feudal overtones in structure and organization, however the aim was no longer the custody of the royal person but simply the control of the approaches to the throne. The days had long since vanished when the earls of Northumberland and Warwick could muster private armies, intimidate royal justices, corrupt the laws of the realm to their own advantage, and demand as their feudal right entry into the royal council.

  This did not mean, however, that the Tudor sovereigns could operate without the aristocracy. Society was hierarchical in form. Rank and title continued to involve economic, social and political privilege and obligation, and noblemen such as the Dukes of Norfolk and Buckingham still maintained complex family systems and extensive personal retinues. The Tudors aimed not at the annihilation of the peerage but merely at its domestication. They sought not so much to curtail aristocratic power as to destroy feudal independence. Aristocratic heads might roll and the lesser sort be elevated to positions of commanding authority, but dukes and earls still raised fighting men for the royal army, managed local government in the king’s name, controlled the approaches to the sovereign, and administered governmental patronage. Consequently politics continued to be organized around men of rank and position, and political success remained as much a question of marriage as of proximity to the monarch. The union of Thomas Howard with the daughter of the Duke of Buckingham was a matter of supreme political importance. As long as men continued to think in family and pseudo-feudal terms, the Duke of Norfolk would never cease to agitate for the marriage of his sister to Edward, Earl of Derby, because, as one contemporary noted, it was ‘an alliance essential to his family strength’.8 The Tudors did not destroy the old system, they simply harnessed it, and Norfolk had to learn that the happy, carefree days of the fifteenth century – when a great baron could arrange such a match without regard to the royal assent – were over. In 1530 the mating of the Earl of Derby to a duke’s sister, without royal licence, was branded as an ‘abduction’, and the Howard family had to seek the King’s pardon and permission before completing the alliance.9

  During the first decades of the century the old nobility clung tenaciously to the feudal standards of the past. Despite royal laws to the contrary, they retained liveried followers, tampered with the legal machinery of the realm, and supported vast, almost feudal establishments. Norfolk and his kind were no longer able to raise private armies, but a great baron’s livery was often sufficient to protect a man from the consequences of his crimes and violence. Edward, Earl of Derby, numbered 220 men on his check-roll; John, Earl of Oxford, rarely moved abroad without a cavalcade of 200 horsemen. In 1562 the fourth Duke of Norfolk entered London at the head of 100 horsemen, dressed in the velvet of his livery, and with four heralds to announce his coming. Even that social upstart, Thomas Cromwell, mimicked the standards of the aristocracy by dressing his retainers in livery of grey marble.10

  The King’s government endeavoured to keep a wary watch upon its over-great magnates, and in 1516 the Earl of Northumberland was ignominiously sent to the Fleet prison and the Marquis of Dorset and the Earl of Surrey were put out of the council for keeping liveried retainers.11 Not unlike governments today in regard to the income tax returns of the great financial and industrial barons of modern industry and banking, the Tudors required that noblemen post accurate lists of their liveried servants. The distinction between private and royal armies was dangerously unclear. Lord William Howard, brother of the Duke of Norfolk and Catherine’s uncle, was expected to muster one hundred mounted men-at-arms and thirty archers for the King’s army, but he would have been clapped into the Tower had he retained any for his private service.12

  The great barons no longer dared to use their armed dependants to intimidate juries and royal judges or to maintain their friends and relations at courts of law, but they did not hesitate to utilize their local position to embrace juries and influence justice in civil cases. Catherine Howard’s father, Lord Edmund, was indicted before the Court of the Star Chamber for having misused his position as Provost-Marshal of the county of Surrey. It was alleged against him that he had maintained his cousin Roger Legh against John Scotte in a matter of disputed land title. The Provost-Marshal was anything but a disinterested judge, since Roger Legh had turned over to him some eighty cartloads of wood cut from the land in controversy.13 The Tudor monarchy was constantly trying to curb this tendency on the part of the nobility to transform the common law into a private preserve for their friends and kin. The fact remains, however, that justice was highly susceptible to influence, and in the shires the aristocracy could and did exercise a form of judicial patronage.

  Behind the political, judicial and military influence of the nobility stood their economic strength. Their financial position had sorely deteriorated from that which had supported the extravagant existence of the previous two centuries, when the Duke of Lancaster boasted a yearly income of £12,000 and the Earl of Arundel could claim £66,000 in cash, a sum only slightly less than the entire royal revenue in a normal year.14 But even so, their revenues were impressive. Thomas Howard’s father-in-law, the Duke of Buckingham, was reported to be worth 30,000 ducats annually, his brother-in-law, the Earl of Oxford, 25,000 ducats, and Thomas himself 20,000 ducats.15 With such incomes the barons were able to maintain vast, feudal households. But whether they could have financed the princely palaces of the past is difficult to say. In 1343 the dowager Lady Elizabeth de Burgh had in her house 21 clerks, 18 lesser clerks, 93 esquires, 45 estate officials such as the bailiff and reeve, 51 gardeners, parkers and domestic minions, and12 pages.16 Certainly Cardinal Wolsey’s establishment more than equalled this in an age when labour was both plentiful and cheap, for some 400 persons were numbered as his immediate servants. Henry, Earl of Northumberland, managed with a household of 166, while the Earl of Derby was served by 7 gentlemen-in-waiting and 140 servants
, who consumed annually 56 oxen and 535 sheep.17 In terms of the immense number of individuals financially and socially dependent upon the great magnates, their influence both at court and in the shires must have been considerable. It was not for nothing that the third Howard, Duke of Norfolk could control the election of ten members of the House of Commons from Sussex alone, or that another duke of Norfolk referred to such members as ‘persons as belong unto him and be of his menial servants’.18

  Ultimate political influence was centred at court, for it was here that the final source of royal patronage and office resided. Political and family rivalry revolved round the control of the King’s council and the administration of the royal bounty. The sixteenth century was still a highly intimate society in which people, not institutions, and private cares, not public actions, were important. As yet there was no absolute distinction between the exchequer and the King’s privy purse, or between a civil servant’s sense of duty and his willingness to administer his office for personal gain. In a sense, almost everyone had his price, and though bribery and the operation of office for private profit may not have affected policy, a basic axiom of the era was that to the victor belonged the spoils of political office.

  From the highest post to the most menial, the acceptance of ‘gifts’ was regarded as one of the perquisites of office. Favours, whether they involved decisions at law or the promotion of a friend or relation in government, were always made easy by a substantial gratuity, and it made small difference whether it was Lady Lisle sending a jar of marmalade to the King, or Thomas Cromwell accepting a toothpick and a gold whistle, four live beavers, and 18,000 slates for his roof. When society regarded office as being as much a private sinecure as a public trust, it was inevitable that the path to political success should be paved with the judicious distribution of gifts of every conceivable variety.

  As in all ages, advancement in politics, or, more accurately, success at court, was predicated upon personal acquaintances and the ability to bestow favours. The best positions of all were those closest to the royal ear: the lord chancellor, who administered the king’s conscience (usually for personal profit); the lord privy seal, who controlled a large portion of the royal patronage (again for a reasonable fee); and the lord chamberlain who not only managed the royal household but, more important, bestowed on deserving friends and clamouring relations minor offices which were often close to the king’s person and were regarded as stepping-stones to a lucrative political career. The secret of success was in large measure dependent upon the attainment of royal notice, and the men who controlled the approaches to the royal presence consequently wielded enormous political power. Custody of patronage, irrespective of rank or dignity, was the key to party affiliations. Norfolk, Wolsey and Cromwell each had about him a host of personal followers who looked to their respective benefactor for promotion at court or in the shires. Appointments, such as the groom of the royal bedchamber, maid of honour to the queen, justice of the peace, or even commissioner of the sewers, held endless financial and social attraction even though they often involved onerous duties.

  The measure of political success was the control of patronage, and a sign of the third Duke of Norfolk’s political strength and influence was his ability to negotiate a loan from the royal treasury for his brother, Lord Edmund Howard. It was essential to the duke’s control of his family and his status at court that Lord Edmund, along with other Howard dependants and relatives, should be placed on the commissions of the peace and of the sewers for Surrey; that Brians and Westons, Leghs and Howards, Holdens and Knyvets, all members of the duke’s dynasty, should be listed in the Treasury Reports of 1539- 41 as having received money for services rendered to the government; and that Catherine Howard’s brothers should have been granted licence to import Gascon wine and Toulouse wood.19

  Political empires, built upon the management of local and court patronage, tended in the sixteenth century to merge into family dynasties, since marriage and politics consisted of doing the best for oneself and one’s family. Though blood relationships did not always conceal or mitigate personal rivalry and ambitions, they did at least tend to act as a form of political and party cement. The Howards are often accused of blatant family building and dynastic ambition, but one might as well condemn the peacock for insatiable vanity as criticize the dukes of Norfolk for family aggrandizement, for both characteristics are inherent in the species. Family alliances were tantamount to political existence, and the Imperial Ambassador recognized this fact when he suggested to his master that one way of influencing the Duke of Norfolk was to help him in his plans to marry his son to Henry VIII’s daughter, the Princess Mary.20 In this search for wives and husbands as the foundation for their political empires, the Howards were particularly successful, and they rival the House of Habsburg for the motto: ‘Bella gerant alii: tu, felix Austria, nube – Let others make war: thou, happy Austria, marry!’ The Howards were blessed with the most important asset of a dynastic aspirant – a sufficient number of daughters who could be utilized to fulfil the matrimonial designs of the family. Generally speaking, a Howard lady ‘who strikes the fire of full fourteen’ was considered as being ‘ripe for a husband’. The choice of the groom was solely a matter of family welfare and political expediency.

  Even in eclipse the Howards showed a remarkable propensity for allying themselves with the most vigorous and successful of the parvenus. With unerring eye they selected the rising and often the most unscrupulous elements of the landed gentry as suitable husbands for their legion of daughters. One of Catherine Howard’s half-sisters married Sir Edward Baynton, who lived to be vice-chamberlain to four of Henry’s queens – not an inconsiderable record to escape unscathed four times from the matrimonial convulsions of that unpredictable monarch.21 Included in the family web was Sir Francis Brian, whom even the ‘devil’s disciple’’ himself, Thomas Cromwell, referred to as the ‘vicar of Hell’. Sir Francis was one of Henry’s closest friends and was peculiarly successful in maintaining that friendship in the face of bitter political rivalry and the ‘adulterous’ activities of his two Howard cousins. He died in 1550 in Ireland under circumstances that even in the sixteenth century seemed to warrant an autopsy. The doctors could discover nothing, and sagely concluded that the knight had died of grief – a most uncharacteristic explanation which satisfied no one.22

  Numbered among the Howard satellites were Sir Edmund Knyvet, the King’s sergeant porter, Sir Francis Knollys, later to be vice-chamberlain and privy councillor to Queen Elizabeth, and Sir Thomas Arundel, the grandfather of the first Baron Arundel, and himself an important Tudor work-horse, who, like so many of his contemporaries, ended his career upon the scaffold.23 The Culpeper family were important Howard allies both at court and in the country, and the Culpepers will play a considerable role in this story, since Catherine’s mother was one of that clan, and another member was to go to his death as a consequence of Catherine Howard’s matrimonial indiscretions.24 Finally, both the Boleyns and the Norrises are to be numbered among the widening Howard galaxy. Catherine’s first cousin was Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, while her cousin by marriage, Sir Henry Norris, was executed in 1536 for his presumed intimacy with the ill-starred Anne. All of these were the new men and women of the century, individuals who had sampled the heady intellectual wines of the Renaissance, many of whom had travelled in Italy or France, and who were more at home in the gaudy costumes of the court than in the bulky plate of feudal armour. The Howards did well to fortify the ancient blood of the Mowbrays with the strength and vigour of the nouveaux riches, the men of the future and not of the past.

  The family did not content itself with creatures of the royal bounty and social upstarts; the stiff and uncompromising pride of the feudal past was also allied to their family pattern. Catherine’s aunts, who are to be reckoned by the dozen, were all married to peers of highest station, most of whom could claim the dubious distinction of having played at the risky game of treason, and who could count t
heir rightful share of impaled heads above the tower gate of London Bridge. The Howards could boast alliance with earls of Sussex, Bridgewater, Oxford, and Derby. More distantly they were connected with John Grey, Viscount Lisle, Lord Dacre of the South and John Bourchier, Lord Berners. Even more distinguished, Thomas Howard, the third Duke of Norfolk, was married to Elizabeth Stafford, the daughter of the Duke of Buckingham, a direct descendant of Edward III, whose blood rights to the throne cost him his head in 1521.25 The oldest and the youngest blood of the century were united in the Howard veins, and both family and political position conspired to place the Duke, both as a grandee of the realm and as the head of a family empire, at the pinnacle of a veritable dynasty.

  Like many houses of ancient lineage, the Howards were ‘puffed up with insatiable pride’ and their dynastic ambitions did not stop with the daughters of dukes and earls. As the representatives of the Mowbray line, they had little use for the Plantagenet blood of the dukes of Buckingham, for their Mowbray ancestors had laid claim to royal descent. As the descendants of kings and in their own dignity as dukes of Norfolk, the Howards regarded it as their just deserts to sit as councillors to kings, ride as earl marshals of the host, and supply husbands and wives to royal progeny. The sixteenth-century author Cornelius Agrippa once suggested that there were at least three roads to political advancement in his age. You could win a peerage in war, you could purchase it with money, or, in extremity, you could become ‘a royal parasite, or marry a discarded mistress or illegitimate child of a prince’.26 The Howards regained their dukedom on the battlefield of Flodden, but it was along the last road that they advanced farthest, for above all others, the Howards were the clan from which Henry VIII selected spouses for himself and his family. Two of the third duke’s nieces, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, became Henry’s queens, and though both ended their lives upon the scaffold, the former gave birth to a reigning monarch and England’s greatest queen. But this was only the beginning. Norfolk’s daughter was wedded to Henry’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy; his son was suggested as a worthy husband for the King’s first-born child, the Princess Mary; his niece, Mary Boleyn, became the King’s mistress, and his half-brother, another Thomas, was briefly, if disastrously, contracted in marriage to Henry’s niece, Margaret Douglas, the grandmother of James I of England.27